What You Give is What You Get

In the town hall square, tuning up for a daytime show with Tony James Shevlin and The Chancers. A massive stage has been erected, drum kit, backline and monitors are all complimentary and in place, the band on before us are tearing through a terrific version of ‘Barracuda”. It’s a long way from clambering up on to the back of a P&O trailer and peering twenty yards to your right to see if the other guitarist is playing the same bridge as you. Lovely, tight forty five minutes. Blinking in the sunshine afterwards I realise what a culture shock it is to come off stage and still have a good couple of hours of afternoon left.

Snap!

The Maverick pop-up Medicine Show has been relocated to a leafy grove and looks, feels and sounds all the better for it. I am to wrangle a series of  short solo, small band and off-roading sessions from artists who are (mainly) appearing elsewhere at the festival. Charlie Austen*, who has a self-constructed suitcase-based percussion set up (“I’m playing all this myself you know, it’s not loops”) performs an as-yet unreleased balled called Four Tiny Frames which unaccountably sets off my hay fever**. Red-eyed and sniffing, I congratulate her on the perfect timing with which her sunglasses fell down on to her face mid-song. “I definitely planned that” she grins.

Snap!

Matt Owens is playing guitar for someone else at the festival, but drops by to perform a few numbers of his own. This is the joy of The Medicine Show. He calls in two hours before his allotted stage time, checks out the gear, asks my name, returns an hour later with a beer and we chat amiably about his beautiful vintage acoustic guitar. By this time I would have done almost anything for him. He gently explains what he needs in terms of sound and we tweak things variously until he’s happy, or as happy as an ex-member of Noah and the Whale can be in a field adjoining the goat enclosure. During his set he engages affably with the queue for the portaloos, which snakes along the track fronting the paddock. “Good time to choose to go for a wee” he advises sagely.

Snap!

Our Man in the Field are a trio with a guitar, bass, cello configuration who are setting up under the stars and by the light of a fullish moon which glints off the river. They’re using backline for the guitar and bass which means I have to work with their levels, and everything else needs to be carefully balanced against them. Two of their coterie have already advised me as to their sonic preferences regarding the performance and I have taken their suggestions on board, and then refer back to them a couple of songs in to see what they think. I’ve deliberately kept everything low so that we have to lean in to get the sound. One thinks I’m taking the piss. I explain that it’s a combination of my character of ‘Grumpy Sound Man’ and my naturally sarcastic-sounding tone that is probably misleading. Another admits that their suggestion about the balance of the backing vocal was probably wrong. My character graciously reverts to the prior mix. On stage they are joined by fiddle player extraordinaire Chris Murphy, who despite meeting them that afternoon and being invited to sit in, sounds like he’s been rehearsing with them for a decade. It’s enthralling, moving, breathtaking music - the sort that Guy Garvey might have made if he’d moved to Woodstock in 1968 and signed to Warners. I remark to his partner that Chris’s playing is exquisite. “Mind you, I guess I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know?” “Yeah, but it’s good to hear it” replies Barbara Hershey.

Snap!

Picturehouse have assembled in a community hall to see if our old PA still works and to run through a few of the more untenable numbers in the set for our forthcoming quarterly show in Stowmarket. “It’s a long time since I rehearsed in a village hall” I say. The walls are lined with portraits of benefactors and plaques recording gifts of clocks, indoor toilets and the addition of a kitchen. The Drummer is on his phone. “Someone’s added me to the village WhatsApp group and I need to tell them it’s not my drone” he mentions by way of explanation. “In the old days” someone sighs wistfully “the only way you’d get a call out here would be someone ringing the phone box outside to complain about the noise”.

Snap!

The Bury Folk Collective have invited me - the newly appointed head of a benevolent dictatorship - to bring my This Much Talent project to perform at their monthly contemporary folk night. For someone so used to hiding behind a microphone and an amplifier, the bare bones of an acoustic evening bring forth a whole new set of challenges. Fortunately audience interaction is not only permissible in such circumstances, but encouraged. I emerge from an acoustic guitar instrumental reverie to enquire of Mr. Wendell whether that really was a rendition of Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’, which he assures me it was. By the time we’re on someone has located the switch for the mood lighting. Gib on electric bass*** and Wendell on Gibson jumbo are seated, I’m front and centre telling a lengthy introductory anecdote about how thrilled I was when Geoffrey Kelly out of Spirit of the West had agreed to play on my new CD****, how that never would have happened during the era of phone boxes and what an incredible job he’d done playing on it. “Whereas, tonight…” smiles La Mulley, holding her flute up to the light. “Such a tiny little thing, and yet so expressive!” remarks a flute-loving audience member afterwards.

“Isn’t she just?”

*Explaining to my neighbours in The Moonshine Bar, who are back-announcing their turns and then inviting folk to pop round the corner to see who’s on, I explain “It’s ‘Charlie’ as in the BRIT Awards drug of choice, and ‘Austen’, as in the author…” 

“I had not made either of those connections” remarks MC Smithy, drily.

**I don’t get hay fever.

***”Judas!” etc etc

****”It’s three tracks and lasts…well, it’s a compact disc, it’ll last for ever…”

What Four Words?

I did my first gig in 1980 - that’s the year before Dare, Moving Pictures, Tattoo You and East Side Story were released. Not that that’s got any real relevance here but I see a lot of biographies that start this way.

In between then and now, I’ve been the guitarist in a blues rock power trio, and a baggy-shirted visionary playing The Big Music; a foil in a heavy-big-pop four piece jagged soul band, an acoustic troubadour, an electric wanderer, a founder member of the East Angliacana movement, festival stage manager, three-time author, the quiet one in a Beatles specialist act, and someone who was once part of a group who convinced a theatre audience in our home town that we were a travelling family of Appalachian musicians named the Guitarres. Good times.

I was supposed to have sung my final hurrah in Y2K with the release of an album called ‘This Much Talent’ which bade farewell to both my so-called career and the CD format and yet, here we all are. 

This Much Talent - an all-encompassing body of artistes and auteurs - first made its appearance on a fundraising compilation in 1989, the purpose of which was to raise awareness on behalf of the Venue for Ipswich Campaign. Veterans of the VIC wars still talk fondly of the infamous Caribbean dressing room wrecking exploits of (probably) Noel Gallagher and in hushed tones of the Carter USM expedition with which certain members of the support band still, to this day, bore their partners rigid whenever ‘Sheriff Fatman’ crops up on re-runs of Top of the Pops. Well, one certain member does, anyway… 

I am overly pleased to reflect that some people who were on that compilation (and on This Much Talent Volume 1) are also on this EP - not least my de-facto co-producer and recording mastermind Ian Crow, who probably rarely has thoughts of re-recording the seminal oeuvre of his band at the time, Edible Vomit. Few who purchased the bargain £3.50 twenty-six track cassette look back from a distance with anything but fondness, I’m sure, on the haunting refrain of ‘Chunder Violently’.

However, back to the update. ‘Showtime’ is on that very compilation, albeit with a bum chord which I’ve finally  eliminated, and which dates from so much earlier in my writing expeditions that I distinctly remember being inspired by a Bob Dylan quote that someone had pinned up on the wall of our sixth form common room. This dates its writing to about forty years ago.

As is the way of these things, I should point out that forty years before that, people were coming up things like Al Martino’s ‘Here in My Heart’, but it remains to be seen how far we’ve come in the meantime. It has certainly been an education in revisiting the thoughts and prayers of a fledging songwriter with the benefit of four decades of cynicism and disappointment but without barely having to change a word - maybe a tense or two.

Here it has been elegantly redressed by Pete Pawsey and his Twenty Bars / Chemistry Set West pals before having a last minute one-take flute part added by Helen Mulley. James Partridge, who recorded the original Tascam four track Portastudio version, insisted on the inclusion of four words which had been excised from the re-imagining, for which I am hugely grateful. It was our “…the movement you need is on your shoulder” moment.  

For ‘Stop That for a Start’ I was able to welcome back to the fold Stephen Dean and Richard Hammond, whose combined rhythm section propelled gods kitchen (no capitals, no apostrophe) throughout the nineties and beyond, and who were able to burnish their original arrangement before Nick Zala remotely added pedal steel and then Steve Constable - also of gods kitchen, The World Service, The Company of Strangers, The Star Club, The Perfectly Good Guitars, The Canyons and Picturehouse (no, not that one) – was in one session able to vocalise as Crosby, Stills and Nash and was conveniently on hand to nod meaningfully in the background when Ian mentioned that he had an e-bow kicking around somewhere. Steve also made a long and sustained case for a couple of Neil Young power chords to be subtly re-inserted into the outro right up until the final mix. He won.  

‘The Merchant of Venus’ is a recent write and has been through a few iterations. At one point, deep into a second bottle of Pinot Noir one evening I considered that ideally it would have a flute solo by Geoffrey Kelly, whose band Spirit of the West had been a massive inspiration when I was on the same bill with them at a club in Peterborough on the tour which inspired ‘Home for a Rest’. Through the modern medium of the electric internet I was able to secure that very thing a mere week later. Many thanks to Hugh McMillan from the band for facilitating contact and to Geoffrey for his help and encouragement.

Helen also sang on this one and Ian added – of all things – an autoharp he had just picked up for a song. As it turned out, this song. 

Dirk ‘The Drummer’ Forsdyke did a sterling job on the tricky task of putting his part on after we’d done much of the tracking work – never an easy assignment at the best of times – and then Ian was finally reunited with VIC tape producer James Partridge, who added the Steve Wynn-inspired guitar part at the end, advised on some harmonies and reflected on how different his life might have been if he'd signed up for Otley College, just down the road ‘pon the lef’ hand side, all those years ago.

And so here we are. Thank you to everyone who helped, advised, opined, and all the great performers and writers whose work I’ve absorbed over the years either at a distance or in person, and whose influence has inevitably seeped into every pore of this project. If you can hear it, it’s probably in there, maybe even on purpose.  

https://thismuchtalent.bandcamp.com/album/belgian-whistles

Whoooahhh - your secateurs are on fiiirrre!

“Which one is The Mendlesham Mast?” I interrupt the discussion to enquire. “Is it the tall thin one, or the one that looks like The Empire State Building?” Mr. Wendell is momentarily nonplussed. “I always thought it was that one” he waves peremptorily at the gargantuan structure off the port bow. He doesn’t shout “Robots!” though, which is what my son used to do on his way to nursery.

We are deep in discussion regarding the wisdom of boxed sets - currently The Esher Demos are receiving our attention, and if you don’t know what The Esher Demos are, you’d probably best sit in the back with La Mulley, who is bathed in the warm reflective glow of her mobile device and letting talk of the Bob Johnston sessions wash over her like cool rain on a summer’s night. It is also, coincidentally, both summer, and raining.

We are on our way back from Fiddly’s, where we have been workshopping the festival set in anticipation of our return to the live arena at the tail end of next month. In terms of social distancing and isolation, we are essentially the poster band for government guidelines in that it is astonishingly rare for us to be able to assemble all seven members of the band in one place at any one time anyway, hence the last-month preparation.

It is doubly egregious then, to receive the news that Turny Winn - our esteemed banjoista and Edinburgh Fringe veteran - has been occupying himself in the garden and has inadvertently pruned an integral part of his left hand. “Is it his whole finger?” someone asks, anxiously. “No, I think it’s the one next to it”. He regards the workshop full of awls and bandsaws cautiously. Fiddly takes the precaution of turning the nearest one off at the wall, first pointing out the scar from when he dragged his own finger across it. I quietly regard the bit where a sliced my knuckle with the sharp bit of the dog food can that morning, feeling a bit like Richard Dreyfuss in that bit on the boat in Jaws.

There have already been a number of less-than sympathetic exchanges on social media regarding the impact that Turny’s mishap might have on his technique - my own contribution is to point out that when Deep Purple’s Tommy Bolin was similarly incapacitated, the guitar roadie simply tuned his guitars to a number of open chords, pushed him out on the stage and told him to get on with it. Mind you, there were 14,000 eager Japanese fans waiting to see that performance, not a small group of teachers eager to celebrate the end of term with some gently applied East Angliacana in Colchester.

Mr. Winn compensates for his banjo-less fortune with some hastily adapted melodeon parts (ie he plays some new arrangements on the squeezebox, not that he uses the bellows to strum a G major on the Appalachian frying pan, that’s much more a Fred Frith kind of turn. Although a lot of our stuff is in G, so it couldn’t hurt). As when we had a bass player who played stand-up string, we are playing the same songs, but a subtle shift in instrumentation means that they now have a more pastoral, Trad. arr. aspect to them. 

This is pleasing to us generally, Turny aside, who enjoys playing it and is concerned that this might be part of a greater plot to oust the five string calfskin racquet from the ensemble. I assure him that this is not the case, however someone points out that with the reduction in percussive attack afforded by its absence Young Young Bob is going to have to work a lot harder on the banging and shaking front.

“That’s fine” says Gibbon, over by the bobbin sander. “He is the youngest. Anyway, what did I come in here for..?”

Hovellian.

I have been recorded many times in the past. In fact the other day I was trying to work out how many tapes and CDs we have amassed between us in Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs, but it started getting over-complicated when I couldn’t decide whether The World Service five-song demo that Me, Wendell and Gibbon did at Spaceward counted as one example or three. Nevertheless, between us we’ve been in church halls, sports halls, Baptist chapels, converted pig pens, garden sheds, cellars, caravans, twenty four track custom built digital facilities, radio stations, and – that one time – the BBC Studios at (in?) Maida Vale and come out with some sort of reproduction of our – or at least ‘a’ - performance.

We made a decision at the start of the latest cycle of the seasons to write and record something from scratch, thereby avoiding all of that tedious “Well that’s not what you did live...” entrenchment that can sometimes occur when you’re trying to recreate a performance in the studio and it turns out you've been playing an A minor  against a C major root. You might be able to get away with that sort of shizzle on a Friday night at The Coggeshall Beer Festival, but the pristine digital modern studio will highlight that missing relative major as clear as the nose on your face. Happy is the producer who can work up a track all on his own, fly in a vocal recorded in a hotel room and held somewhere in the ether, whack on a bit of autotune and have it on the kids’ iPhones before their parents even realise what Grimmeh thinks of it on a Friday teatime. Yes, I have been listening to Radio One in the car, how could you tell?

Our de Facto producer – Fiddly – has been patiently recording various contributions to the sum of our parts over the past few weeks, building from a simple guitar and vocal demo which I put down to create a canvas which if not entirely blank*, certainly left room for everyone else to do a bit of colouring in without having to worry about going over the lines. It’s not like we had to rewind the tape over and over again in order to get down the perfect take – we’re not in the eighties, for goodness’ sake – but we thought we might make it slightly easier for the rest of the group by ensuring that it was at least in time.

You may or may not be familiar with the idea of The Click Track. This is the metronomic beat which was initially put on recordings to make sure the drummer played in time without speeding up or slowing down** before industrious recording engineers with one eye on the clock (and the other on the attendant studio bill) decided to largely replace the latter with the former, thereby coincidentally saving a fortune on vacuuming fragments of Vic Firth 5As off the studio carpet. I’ve never been very good with click tracks, and after a couple of run throughs with the default Cubase metronome fighting against my uniquely rhythmic stress and weave approach to strumming the backing track, we decided that alternate methods of keeping in good order were required. Cutting the odd extra beat out of the two inch tape with a razor was no longer an option, and neither was slowing down the tapes by judicious application of the tape brake.

This is where Fiddly’s approach to accomodating studio kit came in extraordinarily handy. There is a long and noble tradition of repurposing surfeit gear at The Hovel – essentially anything which fellow recording folk believe is obsolete, surplus, outmoded, outdated or just overly complicated to operate will be gratefully hoovered up and stored until required with the result that he has accumulated quite the collection of equipment which, with the cycle that these things inevitably follow, has become highly desirable. It’s a strange combination of classic tech and Heath Robinson invention at the business end of the studio complex, which is where we now found ourselves.

 

One reasonably modern thing he had acquired was one of these new-fangled*** loop pedal thingies they’re filling Chantry Park with these days and after a flash of inspiration he scuttled off to the main house to track it down and one extravagant unboxing and a crash course in stomping in time later, we had a chunka-chunka**** rhythm perfectly suited to the syncopation required for a succesful take.

Later we added a guide vocal, a few tracks of backing vocal - building, building, gently building. “I’ve got a proper pop shield” said Fiddly from behind the control room glass as I sang into another vintage mic through some indeterminate gauze stretched across a coat hanger “...but this works, and so much better.”

 

“You don’t want to know how long those tights have been on there” he chuckled in my headphones.

“How long?” I asked good-humouredly.

“What did I just say?”

*One of my favourite jokes from the eighties was that the real name of the bass player in Linx – nicknamed ‘Sketch’ - was ‘Preliminary Drawing’. Obviously the only correct response to this was to reply “You’re lying.”

**You don’t find classic album bands like Bucks Fizz wang on about this sort of thing, do you? [checks earpiece] Oh...

***Circa 2004.

****Technical term.

The Boy Looked at Johnny.

 

Jimmie Nicol, Alan White, that kid who stepped in when Keith Moon fell off his stool* at a The Who gig. The list of stand-in and dep drummers is long, illustrious and – like the road to hell** – paved with good intentions. To add this roll of honour we meet today to celebrate one Linda Stix who, upon hearing that we in The Picturehouse Big Band were one drummer short of quintet agreed to step up and learn our entire set, which as regular readers will know has been laboriously compiled over (literally) many decades of pop history and lovingly curated to the point where we daren’t listen to the originals any more*** in case we become distracted from our core mission of playing the songs in a form of which a pub audience would probably still recognise them, even without the aid of the Shazam (TM) app.

In return, Johnny-out-of-Five Mile High said that he’d guest on a couple of songs, and we learned a handful of theirs (FMH), which meant that for at least half a dozen numbers I would, essentially, be the guitarist in Five Mile High, for Linda is their drummer and The Other Guitarist, in a Clark Kent-esque twist of happenstance, is also their bass player. At one point, to emphasise the wile of the situation he takes off his glasses. Turns out that’s just because they fogged up when he came in from the car park, but you get the gist.

By about the Thursday before the gig I realise with mounting horror that simply recognising the titles of songs doesn’t, technically, count as knowing them****, especially when you have the added responsibility of not being the one who fucks it up for everyone else. (This is me having to (re)learn four songs, three of which I’ve played before by the way. Now multiply that by seven to get some idea of what Linda’s been going through). Hence there is an evening on the sofa with YouTube, a search engine tuned to those guitar tab sites you can get on the electric internet these days, and a Squier Telecaster (with individual saddle bridges and the three way selector switch rewired so that you can run the pick ups in series as well as in parallel. But I digress). In the olden days, of course, you’d be stuck in front of a turntable getting progressively worsening RSI from all that moving the tone arm backwards and forwards on the record, but we have crowdsourcing and the associated resources to cut and paste the same basic errors on to multiple sites these days, which saves a lot of time. And who doesn’t relish the idea of playing Judas Priest’s Breaking the Law in a non-ironic fashion, which is something that comes up less often than you’d like, but more often than you’d think.

Once in The Heart of The Stow***** we are reassured by the ever-avuncular presence of TOG, who assures us that he will be keeping a paternal eye on things****** and providing prompts and cues as required. This is a huge relief to the rest of us, who are frankly often never quite sure where we are during any given middle eight, or what we came in here for in the first place. Our default position in case of any navigation errors is to turn around and glare at whoever is playing bass at the time, which is a handy trope with which to engage. It also helps share the blame around a bit, however as it turns out, no-one demands a Paddington stare, and none of the audience need recourse to Shazam (TM) at any time, such is the diligence that Linda has paid in both listening to the original versions and also in taking note of our quirks and extensions when it comes to arrangements. Admittedly there was a point where I thought my kidneys were going to be dissolved slowly until they filtered out of my body in a coagulant mess, but it turned out that The Bass Player had just stepped on his octave divider pedal by mistake, and I’m sure the foundations of the building are sturdy enough to withstand a couple of verses of that. There was also another passing moment of disbelief and uncertainty, but that’s what being charged £3.20 for a pint of lime and soda will do for you.

The post-show playlist brings up Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion – one of The Drummer’s favourite tracks to play. I remember to send him a text to the gig in which he is currently engaged or – more likely, as we are – packing up in the rain after. “Happy Birthday” I type, two-fingered. “You’re fired” {smiley face}.

Photo credit by friend of the band Claire Woodbridge. Ironically, you can’t see Linda or Johnny in this one.

*One of The Other Guitarist’s favourite jokes goes “Can I help push your stool back in?” “Well, you could buy me dinner first...” kerrtisshhhh

**Presumably that’s the one Chris Rea drives home for Christmas on.

***They later became The New Originals. I know – one paragraph in and three footnotes already. I’m on fire today.

****A handy aides-memoire for any potential audience members who fancy offering to help us out by having a go anytime soon.

*****Coincidentally also the title of an unreleased Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe demo from the 1990 bootleg Yesoteric.

******I know – there’s a whole complex uncle/parent thing going on there. I’m not sure about it myself to be honest.

Another Castle on Another Hill.

It’s been getting a bit embarrassing lately when folk stop you in the street and ask if you’re “playing much?” to simply and frankly answer “No”. More so when you’re in a radio studio, ostensibly to promote your work and career, and you have to give the same answer. A series of family commitments, unforeseen circumstances and parish council prevarications have reduced what was looking like a fairly healthy Summer schedule into a number of pop-up gigs and guerilla appearances, and so when the weather forecast looked like it was going to scupper our plans to perform outdoors at a fund-raiser for Bungay Castle, we were only too pleased to find that it had merely been moved to a nearby village hall for meteorological reasons.

Gibbon and I made up one travelling party, Mr. Wendell and the returning-to-duty Turny Winn another, the final part of the transport triumvirate being La Mulley, who was driving in from a wedding or a family camping trip or something. We were on this occasion Lockwood-less, suffering an absence of Lockwood-ness, in effect, experiencing Lockwoodlessness. This had led to a quick re-jigging (or, more accurately, de-jigging) of the set, which was further trimmed once the final runners and riders were revealed in terms of stage times. This also meant that we didn’t have to side-swipe the drum kit in order to fit a vibraphone on stage, or clear an area the size of Tunstall Forest in order to fit Fiddly’s stage effect rack, although that would have given me the opportunity to lift a couple of the tasty-looking strats that were already racked up to the side*.

Suitably checked in, Mr. Wendell and I went in search of refreshment, for although many of the audience had fully embraced the al fresco nature of the original event and were even now tucking into buffet-sized picnics and hip flasks of various warming nips, we'd not had time for us tea before we came out. Luckily, just across the street lay the village pub – a suitably flag-stoned, beamed den of a place with three hand pumps on and a further half dozen ales chalked on the board. “Are you from over the road?” enquired mine host deliberately. I though back to my first Glastonbury, where we couldn’t get a pre-festival pint in a nearby village for love nor money due to being festival people. We were just over the border, in Nelson’s County, so maybe we looked a bit too Suffolk for their liking. Perhaps it was a different kind of metaphor altogether – Mr. Wendell is a graphic designer, after all... “It’s just that I’ll have to give you plastic glasses if you’re taking them out” he concluded affably. 

 

We were third up, which meant that the team on sound had had time to sort out any issues with the lights and wiring, but not to have burned out from rigging and de-rigging the six turns scheduled to perform. With my Maverick stage-managing experience still fresh I ensured that we both thanked them from the stage and eschewed any of that “How’s the sound for you guys?” malarkey that bands sometimes like to engage with when faced with a room (or field)ful of civilians. We even missed out the “Can you hear the banjo?” lark that all but one of the group so much enjoy, although did mark Tony’s absence from our version of ‘Love Hurts’ with the proper respect that earned Bill Bruford a writing credit for the King Crimson track ‘Trio’. We also managed to shoehorn in a pub quiz moment regarding the number of fire-fighters in the Trumpton Fire Brigade, and Helen had her own Motley Crue moment prior to greeting the crowd. “Where are we?” she hissed “I have no idea!”

Fortunately Gibbon’s pre-match quip about Earsham Boys – Hunter boots and jumbo corduroys – had stuck, and I was able to stage whisper the same across to her as she combined saying 'Hello' with rummaging around in her flute bag**. “I think someone’s stolen my penny whistle!” she exclaimed before simply improvising a solo on flute in the first number instead, as those who are as such talented are wont to do. I sympathised, indicating the apparatus that keeps my guitar from falling over when I’ve finished playing it. “At Maverick I think I lost a stand bag”.

She arched a perfectly Lady Bracknell-esque eyebrow. “A stand bag..?”

*Of course I wouldn't. Not when there was a PAF-equipped Les Paul there as well.

 

**Not a metaphor.

The Kindness of Strangers

 We - Helen and The Neighbourhood Dogs - are not, it should be stressed, a band of independent means. Our fragmented touring schedule (we are not the most hawkish of gig-mongers) means that since we don’t play much* our concert-related income stream does not stretch to budgeting for a week’s recording in the country, two days’ mixing and a subsequent mastering session with a devoted engineer, even at mate’s rates. Hence we are pleased and grateful that our munificent benefactors Sam Inglis and Fenton Steve are the sort of chaps who enjoy nothing more than spending a bucolic Saturday looking concernedly at a whirring laptop, making sure we don’t knock over absurdly expensive microphones, marking out soundtastic sweet spots with masking tape, and making endless cups of tea for us (see blogs passim).

Our latest foray into standing in a big room and playing a song from start to finish, all at the same time, and hoping no-one lets off fireworks in the car park has been lovingly curated once again by our benevolent uncles from darkest Cambridgeshire, and we think it’s the best one so far. Three songs – one of which I distinctly remember demoing with The World Service in the function room of a pub that Google informs me was decommissioned in 1997 – wherein everybody gets a bit of a play, most of us have a sing, and the majority of folk are happy with their arrangements. Fiddly likes to prepare meticulously and has his own form of impenetrable musical notation which future etymologists are more than welcome to try to deconstruct whereas by contrast Gibbon (on bass) is far more of an improviser and a wing-it kind of guy, and so to get a take with which both are happy can be quite the calendar event.

As I say, we recorded these songs live - mainly around one magnificent Soundfield, with additional booster microphones for those elements which were getting slightly lost when fighting against the sound of Mr. Wendell’s mighty room-swamping Gibson acoustic. Meticulous attention to detail was then applied to the soundscapes by Steve (a considerable step or two beyond my contribution of “Could you tweak the banjo a bit?”) who passed on his thoughts to Sam, who then curated the finished objets. Our continued thanks for outside audio perspective, chapel wrangling, and biscuit provision are once again well overdue.

Please have a listen, enjoy if you can, and share at will. We truly appreciate it.

 

http://helenandtheneighbourhooddogs.bandcamp.com/album/nelson

*After the last recording session we did we immediately started looking to the next one. The first date that all six band members were available on the same day was five months hence.

 

"I've marked you down two points for doing some Coldplay..."

A return to where it* all began this week, as a temporarily reconstituted Picturehouse Big Band conduct what we refer to (several times) as a Sunday afternoon ‘live rehearsal’ prior to one of our occasional forays back into the world of birthday-parties-by-request. The Singer, The Bass Player, The Drummer and The Other Guitarist are all present and correct, as is a cheerily receptive audience, thanks in no small part to our two televised support acts – The Old Farm Derby and an England rugby international, which we try very hard not to disrupt by sound checking the drums midway through.

Having originally set up an acoustic strum through a few appropriate covers, we have remembered an exponentially increasing number of things that we like to play, and so the set will eventually come in at a hefty couple of hours’ worth – and although that’s including the traditional onstage conversation and instrument swapping, it's still probably about an hour and a quarter more than we’re actually going to need on the night. Still, it’s nice to stretch out a bit, both figuratively and literally, as the big green tent at The Dove provides ample stage swagger room for all of us – not always the case in our heyday, when we would frequently be shoehorned into the last available space in the bar, whether that be by the dartboard, under the telly or – as on one occasion – tucked in next to the condiments station in the restaurant. The Other Guitarist had to stop between songs to hand out forks and mayonnaise.

After an understandably hesitant start (by our standards) – after all, some of this equipment hasn’t been out from under the stairs in half a decade – we get into our stride and as well as a few old favourite songs, some of their bespoke introductions are getting an airing too. “This is a rehearsal, after all” says The Drummer “So if there’s anything you need to practise, do feel free to join in. I’m brushing up on my drinking”. In the midst of the audience, my KS1 firstborn Lord Barchester is practising his joined up writing by noting down the song titles and marking our performance out of ten like a diminutive Len Goodman or a slightly less acerbic Craig Revel-Horwood**. He is also (naturellement!) wearing a cape, which adds dramatically to the effect of his whirling dervishness during a couple of consecutive Clash numbers in the second set. This is a set I am running behind for, and arrive onstage only just in time to hear the announcement that as well as performing at today's salon, we will also be part of a Summer free festival at Portman Road to celebrate our hosts’ twenty years in the booze and muse trade. “I’m so sorry I’m late” I explain “I was taking my son for a poo”. I consider it unlikely that Joe Strummer had occasion to present this as an excuse for not turning up on time to fight the law. It wasn’t always like this, I reflect.

Mrs K, having taken a temporary leave of absence from audience member duties is privy to a gentleman displeased with our current direction. “I told ‘em – if they play another Radiohead song I’m off!” he mutters as he takes his leave – this delivered in broadest Gyppeswyckian, which adds incalculably to the gaiety of the scene. Back inside, thankfully not everyone is as disapproving by our choice of material and at the conclusion of set two we are invited to continue our performance by an appreciative crowd, albeit one thinned slightly by childcare responsibilities and the realisation that some of them haven't had their tea yet. We use this opportunity to invite friend and former co-Picturehouser Andy Trill up to properly shred his way through My Sharona in his inimitable fleet-fingered fashion. He looks at the disappointing dearth of rack effects and flashing lights at his feet “Give me more gain than I could possibly ever need” he politely requests, before quietly and efficiently going on to tear the roof off the sucker while I look on with a cheese-eating grin of satisfaction. We attend to packing up, grateful that it’s eight o’clock in the evening as we call to carriages, rather than two in the morning - we're not as young as we used to be, you know, however much we might look it.

Back when I started writing about Picturehouse it was to capture and treasure these times for posterity – to keep alive the feel of the moment ere I forget in the fog of the morning after.

By the time I get home there are four live clips from the gig on Facebook.            

*This blog

**We scored an impressive 148 points out of a possible 150, I am told.

 

(The picture at the top of this entry is poster we used for our first gig together. The Other Guitarist got his kids to design it when they were around the age that Barch is now. The eldest of them is now a paramedic who you occasionally see tearing around town under blue lights and sirens. Time is round, and it rolls quickly). 

Thirty Eight Things to Go Wrong.

So, our final rehearsal before next week’s expedition to darkest Colchester is completed. You couldn’t really call it a dress rehearsal since when performing on stage Turny often puts on a skinny tie that makes him look like a member of a late seventies post-punk power pop combo – how you always picture Ric Ocasek out of The Cars during their Just What I Needed pomp, say. Mr. Wendell has taken to wearing a polka dot shirt which lends him the slightly whimsical air of a Robyn Hitchcock, and Helen had taken to sporting a pair of spray-on leggings covered on Shakespeare quotations until she noticed that the ‘Ham’ from ‘Hamlet’ was emblazoned perfectly on her upper thigh. I myself usually pick out the cleanest checked shirt in the wardrobe, which is frequently the one I wore at the last gig, so carbon-dating the age of any band I’ve been in through the medium stage wear has become an increasingly knotty issue over the past two decades*.

We ran through everything a couple of times, just to bed in new yet enduring bassist Gibbon, whose arrival in our midst has been necessitated firstly by the departure of original stand-up guy Ant and then also of his replacement, Producer Andy, whose lucrative side line in playing bass for Purple Rain – A Tribute to Prince means that since the recent surge of interest in the work of one of Minneapolis’ favourite sons he gets to fly by private plane into tax havens to perform the music of the Stack-Heeled Sex Impness of Funk rather than the slightly more staid East Angliacana’n fare we cater for, with, and to**. Also along for the ride is SftBH alumnus Fiddly, in whose shed we are rehearsing, and whose pre-match chocolate cake and tea we are fortified with. Not being a self-styled full-time filler of the ranks, Fiddles describes himself as a Three Legged Dog. Their approaches to the run through are both familiar and heartening. Gib wants to know which key to start in and after that pretty much anything can happen, and Fiddly wants to know how many bars we’re going to do at the end, so he knows when to stop. The only thing they really have in common is that they’re both actually called Richard.

We have secured the expertise of a proper sound engineer and their bespoke PA system for the gig itself, mainly because they haven’t received any more better offers since we asked if they’d do it for us a favour***. We have engaged two guest turns (“…a couple of mics please, and a monitor would be great!”) , arranged load-in and sound check times, forwarded details of parking, run off some posters, created events on three separate social media platforms, alerted the press and I have worked out the settings I’m going to use on all three electric guitars, the twelve string, and the bouzouki. I’ve also forwarded a copy of the stage plan and technical specs (although I did lose brownie points on that as it wasn’t formatted to print in landscape). And that’s just for one Tuesday night, low-key run through of some material before we go to record it in a couple of weeks' time. At one place I’m playing shortly they won’t even let your gear in the room unless it’s got an up to date PAT certificate****. Imagine what it’s like then for your local arts centre, folk club, open mic, songwriter’s showcase or blues club promoter who does this every week!  

We’ll leave a tips jar on the bar for you to show your appreciation.

 

*If I’m wearing a white shirt with a heart overlaid with an ‘X’ on the breast pocket it’s a photograph of As Is. That was a gift from a grateful record industry on behalf of Duranduran, whose “1988 single “I Don’t Want Your Love” fell swiftly from its debut chart position of #14, despite EMI’s best efforts to promote it through the dispensation of form-flattering wardrobe. Go on – try and remember how the chorus goes. See?  

**To be fair, he also plays in the Tony Winn Trio, so it's not all "Twenty minutes, off, helicopter, back to the Warwick Hotel, two birds each."

***i.e. ones that pay, and at least at time of writing.

****You’ve got Google – go and look it up.

Possibly the most English thing I've ever done...

On Sunday we - The Neighbourhood Dogs, in our latest iteration – stood four and a half square beneath the shelter of a marquee performing our own brand of East Angliacana before a cricket match, in the rain. And when I say 'before' I mean, quite literally, in front of. The Papworth Everard Village Fete was in full swing, as were the (mostly) outclassed batsmen of the home side, caught fraught in the onslaught of nearby Yelling, who took the match - and the trophy - in a not very closely-fought annual battle of the village rivals. Put it this way – our set lasted very slightly longer than the home side’s innings, although both started with someone shouting “Catch it!”. Personally, I think they should have challenged the slightly less nearby village of Over, but that’s just so I could have included some additional pun-ditry round about here.   

But this is to dwell unnecessarily on the lamentable. Prior to our performance Sam Inglis had probably out-Englished even us with his doughty selection of traditional folk tunes, including a splendid Reynard the Fox which was obviously written, as he acerbically observed, “…by someone who has never been to Royston” (approximately fifteen miles from where he was sitting, as the crow flies). A good attempt, but despite his best efforts I don’t think we actually reached peak English until shortly after our set, when a vibrantly polka-dot be-frocked scion of the landed gentry went full jolly-hockey sticks in awarding the prizes for the Victoria Sponge competition.

Being pretty much a scratch line-up due to prior holiday and theatrical commitments on the parts of both Producer Andy and Turny Winn, Mr. Wendell, Helen & I were bolstered by the incipient stand-in skills of gods kitchen and SftBH alumnus Mr. Gibbon, on whose behalf our promoter and sound man Steve played an old Goodies single over the PA as our intro music, which was a thoughtful gesture. We were also joined by the ‘half’ mentioned earlier, Steve’s daughter Amelie, who was to play flute on our closing number, Come On#2*. 
 
Due to Gibbon’s familiarity with some of our further back-back catalogue, we had eschewed some of our more recent song writing efforts in favour of tunes that most of us knew all of already and were mostly in G, just to keep things doubly simple. Amelie sat rather nervously through the show and then, at her cue, steadied herself, drew a deep breath and played a lovely octave counter to Helen’s part before sitting rather relievedly back down again, graciously declining the opportunity to jam on our encore despite our entreaties and encouragement that “…it’s in G, like that one”. The twin flute attack - which I have experienced once before, in another lifetime - is something that we might have to look at again. Mellifluous, it is.

As the day’s activities drew to a close, the bouncy castles were deflated, the Pimm’s was reduced to a pound a pint to clear the dregs, the clouds cleared and happened that most English of occurrences at the culmination of any drizzly community event. The sun came out.  

*Performed on SftBH ‘Tree’ by Paul Mosley, whose folk opera album The Butcher is out now.

Happenings Ten Years Ago.

There was a reunion of sorts at the weekend, wherein grizzled music veterans - alumni and alumna of the  school of hard folk which was Songs from the Blue House - reassembled at Fiddly's country gaff The Hovell to catch up with what we'd all been up to recently. We had a pretty strong line up, including the two Steve's from Too's "Then There Was Sunshine" guitar chorus and TT, who'd travelled from distant climes in order to barbecue things and get gently sun-pinked. Freed from all that having to tune guitars and play chords in the right order malarkey, there was a relaxed vibe amidst the wafting aroma of sizzling sausages and gently toasting halloumi. A couple of us couldn't resist taking the beaters to Fiddly's home-built vibraphone and improvising gently in the hazy summer heat, and besides, there were many fewer wasps inside the shed than out. 

It wasn't always as relaxed as this though, you know. We once had albums to launch, benefit gigs to play, EPs to release, message boards to moderate...if only there were some sort of time capsule we could...oh...

https://web.archive.org/web/20060822045026/http://www.songsfromthebluehouse.com/arch0905.htm